A method to smooth and filter images is disclosed in the publication “A Framework for Anisotropic Adaptive Filtering and Analysis of Sequences and volume” in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASP); San Francisco Mar. 23-26, 1992; p. 469-472, vol. 3, by H. Knutsson, L. Haglund and G. H. Granlund. The approach described in the cited publication makes use of quadrature and steerable filters having a set of different orientations including at least three different orientations in the case of 2-D image processing, and at least six different orientations in the case of 3-D image processing. The algorithm written from this approach requires the application of all the filters involved in the filtering of one image. The resulting algorithm complexity has been found to be high. So, the calculation time is particularly long.